Jefferson's Daughters Page 3

  Twice Martha and her daughters fled, barely ahead of the British advance. In January 1781, Jefferson packed his family into a carriage headed west as he remained behind in Richmond, belatedly attempting to mount a defense against Benedict Arnold’s attack. They left behind the slaves they had brought to the capital to serve them—George and Ursula and their children, and several Hemingses, including Elizabeth and her daughters Mary and Sally. So panic-stricken was the patriots’ flight, Ursula’s son Isaac recalled that “in ten minutes not a white man was to be seen in Richmond.” Jefferson, too, joined the exodus. After destroying the abandoned ammunition and capturing the slaves, the invading British left to join forces with General Cornwallis, who was making his way east down the peninsula through Williamsburg and on to Yorktown. Resting his troops in the little town on the York River, Cornwallis looked in vain for the reinforcements that he expected to sail into the Chesapeake Bay from New York. Reunited with his family, Jefferson spent some time in safety at his father’s old plantation at Fine Creek just west of Richmond before they all returned to the state capital. The war news got progressively bleaker, however, as the governor received reports that the British land forces were amassing at Yorktown while their navy maneuvered to seal off the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay to protect them.

  In those dark days, as it appeared that the Revolution might be lost in his own state, Jefferson suffered another blow. On April 15, 1781, his infant, Lucy, died, a grievous loss to the couple. A week later, the British were on the move again. With no time to recover from Lucy’s death, Martha and her daughters, now eight and two, fled to Elk Hill. But whatever respite they may have enjoyed in Martha’s peaceful home was short-lived. By June they were back at Monticello, as Jefferson sought to move the government from the hazards of Richmond to the safety of Charlottesville, farther west. Determined to capture the man whose Declaration of Independence was a clarion call for rebellion, however, Cornwallis sent his most fearsome lieutenant, Colonel Banastre Tarleton, to Monticello, while he turned his own fury on Elk Hill. For the third time in less than six months, Martha was forced to flee with her two little girls, leaving her husband behind to an uncertain fate. This time, they traveled deep into southwest Virginia, finally arriving at Poplar Forest near Lynchburg, part of the estate they had inherited from John Wayles. Jefferson joined them en route, having eluded capture by a scant few hours.

  Inexplicably, Monticello was spared depredation; Elk Hill, they would later learn, was not. Cornwallis’s army destroyed the corn and tobacco; likewise “all my barns,” Jefferson complained bitterly. They slaughtered any animals too young to be of service or used to feed his soldiers and stole about thirty slaves, according to Jefferson’s count. His term as governor having expired, Jefferson and his family remained at Poplar Forest through the end of July. They returned to Monticello in early August. Before the month was out, Martha was pregnant again.

  Yet as she looked back on those harrowing days of her childhood, it was not the trauma, the dislocation, and the horror of war that, as an adult, Martha would remember years later. She said nothing of the terror of sudden warnings and flight, of a grieving and exhausted mother, or of a distraught and overworked father. Perhaps that omission indicates how successful her parents were in protecting her from the worst effects of the war. It certainly suggests a remarkably strong mother, who, despite her failing health and the deaths of several of her children, conveyed confidence in her ability to keep the family safe—even in wartime. Each time they fled, they did so, at least initially, without Jefferson. When the Marquis de Chastellux, a French visitor to Monticello, described Martha Jefferson as a “mild and amiable wife,” he was observing her in the spring of 1782, toward the end of her final pregnancy. If she seemed quiet and somewhat reserved, it is understandable in the context of her failing health. But his phrase, a universal compliment to the good wife in the eighteenth century, does not quite comport with the history of her married life, with what she had endured, or with the terrors from which she shielded her daughters.

  The little girls’ travels about Virginia, whether prompted by British troop movements or by their father’s political obligations, may not have been, in and of themselves, traumatic. Indeed, extended visits among the eighteenth-century gentry were common. And in the Jeffersons’ case, these visits—forced though they were—brought Martha and Maria a sense of safety and security, drew them more closely to their extended family, and encouraged them to view the Virginia landscape as dotted with the homes of friends and relatives ready to receive them. Martha Jefferson frequently turned to her half sister Elizabeth Wayles Eppes for help during her pregnancies and ill health. And, as we have seen, Elk Hill was a favorite haven, as was Poplar Forest, a plantation that fell to Jefferson from the Wayles inheritance. Martha frequently took her daughters to Elk Hill while Jefferson was away, as slave Isaac Jefferson recalled, and little Martha came to love it as her mother had.

  Maybe it was also the place of Martha’s happiest childhood memories from when her mother was still alive. Certainly it did not harbor the aura of death and grief associated with Monticello, where little Jane, her nameless brother, and her grandmother Jane Jefferson had died. And it was a refuge from the dust and commotion of Monticello’s construction. At Elk Hill, Martha and her daughter could spend quiet hours together. Scholars have missed this point; typically they contrast what they regard as an emotional distance between mother and daughter with the extraordinarily close relationship that Martha would develop with her father over the course of her life. But they forget how much time mother and daughter spent together and how much Martha would have learned at her mother’s knee.

  In keeping with the conventions of her day, Martha Jefferson would have been her child’s first teacher. The village of Charlottesville, which one traveler noticed could boast no more than a court house, a tavern, and a tiny cluster of houses when Martha was growing up, did not have a school. In any event, in this period, female education was hardly a priority. Privileged girls would be fortunate to learn to read and write, play a musical instrument, dance, embroider, and perhaps speak a little French. Martha Jefferson could play the harpsichord very skillfully and was, in the estimation of a Hessian officer held as a prisoner of war in Charlottesville, “in all respects, a very agreeable, Sensible & Accomplished Lady.” Martha likely schooled her daughter to read and write (girls were taught a different hand than boys), began her music lessons, and trained her in the manners expected of a young Virginia lady. It is possible that it was at Elk Hill that the young Martha learned to ride, taught by the mother who had first arrived at Monticello on horseback, or plied the first stitches of the needlework exercises required of gently raised Virginia girls under the watchful eye of her mother.

  Given both her age and the itinerant quality of her childhood, little Martha would not have had lessons in household management. Unlike her future daughters, then, Martha did not have any bitter complaints about household chores in her recollections of growing up. But the mother who possessed “considerable powers of conversation,” according to her daughter, plus “all the habits of good society, and the art of welcoming her husband’s friends to perfection,” was the perfect guide for this girl who would grow up to be universally admired for her ability to charm all who met her.

  Only two accounts of Martha’s childhood in Virginia exist: one by a French visitor, the Marquis de Chastellux, in the summer of 1782, and the other by Martha herself as an adult. Both remembered Jefferson, and not his wife, as the guiding force of Martha’s education. Although newly met, Chastellux was quickly welcomed into the family circle. Long conversations about books, travel, and architecture endeared the two men to each other. Jefferson discovered Chastellux’s “worth and abilities [that] impressed me with an affection for him which under the then prospect of never seeing him again was perhaps imprudent.” For his part, the Marquis was captivated by the architecture of Jefferson’s home, the nimbleness of his mind, the depth of his learning, and
the quality of his conversation. So it is no surprise that he deduced that Jefferson took charge of educating his children, whether Jefferson told him so or not.

  Martha remembered that “during my Mother’s life he bestowed much time & attention on our education, our cousins the Carrs and myself.” These memories do not quite match those of Jefferson himself, however. In 1818, he admitted to a friend that “a plan of female education has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me,” and that his own daughters’ education only “occasionally required” his attention. Jefferson had sketched out in broad strokes his recommendations for girls’ reading: select novels only (most being inclined to result in “a bloated imagination [and] sickly judgment”), select poetry (for the same reason) to promote “style and taste,” and French, dancing, drawing, and music. It was an utterly conventional program, essentially unchanged by thirty eventful years of revolution and republic-building. Of lessons in budgeting household accounts, Jefferson knew, “I need say nothing,” since he assumed all parents would teach their daughters not to spend the hard-won earnings of their future husbands. In other words, Jefferson described precisely the program of female education his wife had been well equipped to administer to her daughter forty years earlier.

  But it is also clear, as we shall see, that when Martha Jefferson entered her convent school in France at almost twelve, she began her studies with classical, not juvenile, literature. This suggests some prior preparation, although we know nothing from Jefferson’s hand or her own about what that may have been. Martha may have provided a clue, however, when she mentioned her cousins the Carrs. Martha Jefferson Carr, Jefferson’s sister and the widow of his boyhood friend Dabney, was probably living at Monticello by the troubled spring of 1781. The arrival of Martha Jefferson Carr’s brood—three sons and three daughters—may well have been the impetus for Jefferson’s serious thought about children’s education generally, and about his daughters’ in particular. Jefferson became a second father to his six nieces and nephews, particularly to Carr’s eldest son, Peter. Jefferson was busy with public life when the boy first came under his tutelage at age eleven, but back at Monticello he was able to devote more time to Peter. After his disastrous second term as governor, in which he had been unable to repel invading British forces, a determined Jefferson swore to have “taken my final leave of every thing of that nature [politics], have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.” Thus freed, he turned his attention to the eight children under his roof.

  This brief period of respite from public life at Monticello is why both the adult Martha and Chastellux could report with confidence that Jefferson had taken charge of the children’s education that spring of 1782. By March, Peter Carr was already reading Virgil, probably in Latin, and Jefferson planned to start schooling him in French. Ten-year-old Sam Carr was halfway through a beginner’s Latin primer, and at nine the youngest son, Dabney, was almost ready to begin his studies in Latin. Around this time, too, Jefferson probably began to frame a program of reading for his precociously bright nine-year-old daughter.

  Martha may well have sat alongside Peter in an improvised schoolroom at Monticello; the sons and daughters of Robert Carter, one of the wealthiest planters in the Northern Neck of Virginia, shared the same tutor and classroom, in spite of the considerable range in their ages. But proximity did not necessarily mean access to the same curriculum; male and female education in the colonial period had very different aims. There is no evidence, for instance, that young Martha learned Latin alongside her cousins.

  This period of domestic peace was shattered, however, not by yet another British attack but by a momentous family tragedy. For all the dangers the Revolution posed for her family, it was not the attacks on Richmond, the frantic departures, the destruction at Elk Hill, or the attempt of the British to capture her father that daughter Martha recorded in her memoir years later. Her war story, which she recounted in detail, was that of her mother’s death and her father’s grief.

  —

  IN MAY 1782, JEFFERSON’S wife had given birth to their last child, Lucy Elizabeth. Martha was dangerously ill and sinking, and this time it was clear that she would not recover. Her husband devoted himself to her care. “For the last four months that she lingered he was never out of calling,” daughter Martha remembered. “As a nurse no female ever had more tenderness or anxiety; he nursed my poor Mother in turn with aunt Carr and her own sisters setting up with her and administering her medicines and drink.” When forced to attend to work, he did so “in a small room which opened immediately at the head of her bed.”

  At nine, little Martha may have been barred from the room by her concerned aunts. Almost one hundred years after these events, her granddaughter told a story that had been passed down to her. “Mrs. Jefferson had been too ill to see the child for some time, when one day the latter was called in to see her mother dressed and sitting up in a chair, as something that would please her.” Instead “for the first time the truth flashed on her as she saw death stamped on the invalid’s pale face; and so overcome was she by the shock that she was obliged to leave the room.”

  Therefore, more than her mother’s death, Martha remembered better her father’s response, observed, perhaps, from outside the sickroom door. Jefferson’s wife died on September 6. “A moment before the closing scene he was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility,” she wrote, his response a perfect image of her own earlier one, “by his sister Mrs Carr who with great difficulty got him into his library where he fainted and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would revive.” When, in fact, his wife was gone, the distraught husband gave way altogether. “The scene that followed I did not witness but the violence of his emotion, of his grief when almost by stealth I entered his room, right to this day I dare not trust my self to describe,” Martha wrote almost fifty years later.

  In that instant, Martha became her father’s emotional caretaker, a role she would fill for the rest of his life. “He kept to his room three weeks and I was never a moment from his side,” she recalled; there he “walked almost incessantly night and day.” Martha’s sisters remained at Monticello for weeks afterward, no doubt helping to care for the three children whose father was incapacitated by grief. “When at last he left his room he rode out and from that time he was incessantly on horseback rambling about the mountain,” Martha remembered; “in these melancholy rambles I was his constant companion, a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”

  The cataclysm of Martha Jefferson’s death accomplished what the British armies had not been able to do: It brought an end to Martha’s childhood, caused the family’s departure from Monticello, and fractured Martha Wayles Jefferson’s two families, Jefferson and Hemings. Within two months, Jefferson would grasp at the congressional appointment to represent the United States in final peace negotiations with Great Britain. When at last he would leave Virginia, he would deposit his two youngest daughters with Elizabeth Eppes, the younger sister of their mother and the aunt most like her, and make the decision to take with him to Paris eleven-year-old Martha. He would also part Elizabeth Hemings from two of her children: nineteen-year-old James would accompany him to Paris, while nine-year-old Sally, he decided, was old enough to accompany Maria and Lucy to the Eppes plantation until his return. These directives, made at the will of the master of Monticello, would have enormous repercussions in all their lives. Nothing would be the same again.

  IT WAS NOT THE FIRST time Congress had tapped Jefferson to represent his country in France. In June 1781, Congress had appointed him minister plenipotentiary, to round out a diplomatic commission consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens. Since France had joined the war as an ally of the United States after the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777, the United States had maintained a diplomatic presence at the court of Louis XVI to sustain the alliance. As minister plenipotentiary, Jefferson would rank just low
er than Ambassador Franklin but could exert full power and authority in the commerce treaties he was to negotiate. The summons had found him in the midst of deep political troubles: the Virginia House of Delegates had decided to launch an investigation of the former governor’s conduct during the British invasion. Determined to remain in Virginia to fight for his reputation, Jefferson refused the appointment, resolving to leave public life forever to enjoy the domestic comfort of Monticello. The news of Martha Jefferson’s death almost a year later, however, prompted James Madison to resubmit Jefferson’s name for the appointment. “All the reasons which led to the original appointment still existed,” Madison argued, and as an intimate friend of Jefferson’s, he rightly guessed that “the death of Mrs. J. had probably changed the sentiments of Mr. J. with regard to public life.” Congress readily agreed; it passed the motion unanimously.

  The commission, dated November 12, reached Jefferson two weeks later at Ampthill, the Chesterfield County plantation of his friend Colonel Archibald Cary. “Your [letter] finds me at this place attending my family under inoculation,” Jefferson replied to Madison on the twenty-sixth. The return of Jefferson’s captured slaves, who had been exposed to smallpox during their captivity at Yorktown, posed a significant risk to his daughters’ health. Inoculated himself in Philadelphia in 1766, he knew the process well. Just as faithfully as he had tended to his dying wife, he now served Martha and Maria as their “chief nurse,” as Martha called him. It is likely that he had left the infant Lucy, too tiny to be subjected to the infection, with her aunt Eppes. By this time, Francis and Elizabeth Eppes had moved from The Forest west and south to the banks of the Appomattox River, where Francis had built a home he called Eppington. After visiting them there for the first time—or so it seems, since he hired a guide to show him the way—Jefferson then went to Ampthill and spent November in seclusion with his daughters.